When Drupal 8.0 was released two and a half years ago, with a built-in REST API, it signaled the start of Drupal's evolution to an API-first platform. Since then, each of the five new releases of Drupal 8 introduced significant web service API improvements. Drupal 8.6, shipping in September, will also have a new bunch of API improvements.

In Lisbon, steep slopes and sweeping vistas towering over placid waters and crowded ports characterize the topography of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

This year, the Portuguese capital played host to Drupal Developer Days, possibly the most important event for developers specializing in Drupal. Held at the University Institute of Lisbon, it was a conference not to be missed, with innumerable insights from Drupal core contributors and maintainers.

With a uniquely diverse community of designers, developers, and everyone in between, Frontend United is one of the conferences I find I enjoy more and more each time I attend. And this time, in Utrecht, a wide range of designer- and developer-oriented content greeted attendees both within and well outside the Drupal universe.

Revered management thinker Peter Drucker once wrote, “If you can’t replicate something because you don’t understand it, then it really hasn’t been invented; it’s only been done.” In many ways content modeling in Drupal has been done without being invented. For this reason, we’re developing a discipline for content modeling at Acquia. It’s drastically reducing both costs and defect rates for us.

As more organizations are using JavaScript frameworks to create visitor-facing experiences with Drupal as a backend, Dries Buytaert reports on the progress towards creating a JavaScript-driven Drupal Administration Interface.

As we saw in the previous post, core REST only allows for individual entities to be retrieved, and Views REST exports only permit the issuance of GET requests rather than unsafe methods as well. But application developers often need greater flexibility and control, such as the ability to fetch collections, sort and paginate them, and access related entities that are referenced.

In this column, we'll inspect JSON API, part of the surrounding contributed web services ecosystem that Drupal 8 relies on to provide even more extensive features relevant to application developers that include relationships and complex operations such as sorting and pagination.

When Phillies hats begin to dot the landscape and one of the most beautiful train stations in the country materializes around you, you know you're in Philadelphia, a city I can never seem to stop loving. After a brief hiatus, Drupaldelphia was in full swing this year, attracting developers, creatives, and businesspeople from all over Pennsylvania and surrounding states to a conference that is always full of pleasant surprises.

As we saw in a previous installment of Experience Express, because Drupal has a HAL-compliant REST API available out of the box with minimal configuration, you can easily provision an API that can immediately be employed to consume content entities and manipulate them from other applications. Now that we have successfully exposed content entities as REST resources, used Entity Access to govern permissions, and customized the formats and authentication mechanisms in use by the core REST API, it is now time to move into actually retrieving and manipulating that data.

As the weather heated up last week in Nashville and the city's eponymous hot chicken incinerated tongues left and right, something else was burning in the spotlight at DrupalCon Nashville: decoupled Drupal.

The Starter Kit includes three separate applications to demonstrate various Headless Drupal design patterns: a React application, a GraphQL application, and a Headless Lightning Drupal website. Each application was created to work in tandem with each other, but also as a collection of boilerplate tools for your personal applications.